Life imitates art imitates life?

Talk about “ripped from today’s headlines” … here’s an excerpt I was just editing last night from g0ddesses.net, my comic novel-in-progress. The scene’s set on a discussion forum that’s modeled after Hacker News:

startup founder: ladzzz.com is like Quora meets Foursquare with questions guys want to know about. and game mechanics.tech blogger: i know an unnamed startup doing Quora meets GameCrush with game mechanics like Zyngaangel investor: you’re thinking small. why not Quora plus Badgeville’s game mechanics for the enterprise?

Last week we asked whether we needed a Yelp for the enterprise. Ed Borasky* suggested that Quora could fill the role of providing crowdsourced reviews of enterprise software vendors. Focus.com, a more business-centric questions and answer site, could possibly do this as well.

But what about Quora for the enterprise?

Indeed! And reading further in the story, discovered that one of the contenders is “is applying gamification principles in an attempt to drive adoption”.

Nice to know I’m in sync with the Zeitgeist.

Life imitates art.

But art imitates life, too. Back at Microsoft in 2006, one of the game-changing strategies we came up with on the Ad Astra project was to leverage the web Q&A platform along with other consumer products like MSN Messenger in the enterprise by combining them with Sharepoint’s strenghts — and another strategy was “game-centric user interfaces”. It remains a great idea, and let’s hope one somebody succeeds with it: one of startups in the article,** an established company like Jive or SocialText, or a new venture.

And while we’re on the subject of great Ad Astra ideas I hope somebody will succeed with, how about taking a diversity focus with Q&A? The upside of Q&A is huge; Naver’s success in South Korea highlights how well it complements algorithmic search. With Google starting to be overwhelmed by content farms and spam, there’s a lot of money to be made. So unsurprisingly, it’s a very cluttered space. And the engineering isn’t rocket science, so how can a company get a sustained competitive advantage?

Quora’s approach has been to concentrate on the Silicon Valley technology community, well-known early adopters who are very influential. And it’s worked out great for them: an active early community, huge amounts of media attention, funding on ridiculously good terms, and usage now starting to skyrocket. So far so good. Now what?

Back in November, Kara Swisher framed Quora’s challenge as “trying to move the site well beyond its Silicon Valley-tech-dudes forum to one in which a plethora of topics and memes thrive.” They certainly have a good opportunity. So I asked what they’re doing to create a more diverse user base. At some point, I sent it to Charlie Cheever from Quora. Three months later, nobody’s responded. I guess I got an answer.

A different approach (the one we proposed for Microsoft, before they cancelled the Q&A project and killed the MSN Messenger brand) would be to start with diversity. Get a first foothold with women, Latinos, seniors, bilinguals, and other “niche” markets that almost nobody’s targeting. There are a lot more of them out there than techie white guys — and their needs aren’t being met well by today’s search engines, so there’s a lot more upside.

Oh well. If Quora won’t do it, maybe somebody else will. In my novel, g0ddesses.net introduces a Q&A system designed by a woman and implemented by a diverse, mostly-female team. With any luck at all, life will imitate art.

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Comments

For now, Quora feels like a website designed for techie insiders without instructions for mainstream users. But its smart community, intriguing questions and way of showing users just the content they want to follow will keep people coming back to the site. With a lot of polishing, Quora could be a social network people use every day.

On Twitter, Liz Gannes of AllThingsD (who’s taken over the Quora beat from Kara Swisher) commented

Don’t think it’s designed by women, but I’d imagine Facebook Questions is rolled out to a relatively representative sample.

I had asked a Facebook Question back in August, when they first started testing it, and 90% of the responses were from guys. It’s far from scientific, but a couple of other questions I looked at also had mostly guys answering (1, 2, 3). So … hard to know.

April 23: Facebook’s revamped their questions, making it much more poll-oriented. And at least based on my feed, Liz’ prediction is accurate: it seems to have pretty diverse participation.

Charlie Cheever’s got a post on Quora called Scaling Up, describing how a some of Quora’s processes have broken due to the recent influx of new users, and what they’re doing in response.

Our philosophy around this is that we want to empower users that care about creating and maintaining great resources to be able to do this effectively. So, if you care about keeping the Wiz Khalifa topic up to date and accurate, you can do that. And if you care broadly about making Quora a civil, great place to share knowledge, we’ll build tools to help you do that.

And if (like me) you care about making Quora a more diverse place, apparently they’ll ignore you. But I digress.

They’ve got a three-point plan to deal with the scaling issues. For one thing, they’re going to make new users take a short “tutorial quiz” before adding content. Really? That’s a pretty high bar to help somebody out by answering their question. How many people want to be part of Quora that badly? So new users are a lot more likely to be “read-only”.

They’re also going to introduce an algorithm to “determine user quality”. In the comments, Liz Pullen makes a great point:

“Low quality”, unfortunately, seems to be a judgment that is levied on people, not the content they create. This practice just furthers the view by some that Quora is an insular, elitist website.

Yeah really.*

Not only that, unless Quora’s really careful, automated ranking will become another barrier to diversity. On most of these systems, longer-term users generally are “higher quality”: they have more posts, more upvotes, more followers, more experience knowing how to do well on the quality metrics, etc. So with Quora’s current techie male base starts with a huge advantage. On the other hand if they don’t give the current base an advantage, they’ll be justifiably bummed. A tricky situation. And on top of that, many of automated ranking schemes embed gender and language biases; TechMeme’s a particularly egregiousexample. If Quora doesn’t pay attention to diversity as they’re designing their ranking, it’s likely to further privilege guys and native English speakers and marginalize everybody else.

Speaking of which, another part of Liz’ comment is worth calling out:

And, please, as soon as possible, on the main site or a subsite, allow people to converse in their native language. Without becoming multi-lingual, Quora’s growth will be forever stunted and its knowledge base will be limited and poorer.

* I’d vote Liz’ comment up, but alas Quora doesn’t provide that functionality. Quora also doesn’t allow formatting in comments, have a preview button, or allow you to edit a comment once you’ve posted it. See Power vectors and HTML in comments for more. Update, April 2014: to give credit where credit is due, Quora now supports all the functionality in the post that I mentioned in this footnote. However they still haven’t introduced multilingual support.

Update from Jon: the useless and ugly bit above the line here is an automatically-generated linkback from a comment I put on Charlie Cheever’s Quora post. Compare with the much more useful automatically-generated linkback from a Quora answer later in this thread….

Products that prioritize diversity as a goal make different tradeoffs: thinking about multi-lingual issues from the beginning, focusing on diverse communities rather than concentrating on techie early adopters, applying principles of gender HCI, etc. e…

Update from Jon: the bit above the line here is an automatically-generated linkback from a Quora question I asked there — very nice! Compare with the much less useful automatically-generated linkback earlier in this thread from a comment I put on somebody else’s Quora post. It’s another example of Quora having much richer functionality for questions than comments. I talked about the power differential this introduces a couple of years ago in Power vectors and HTML in comments.

I’m interested in learning spaces. Where organic connections can be supported by both visible and invisible community. For example, I often answer questions about all kinds of topics on Aardvark (via gchat) because it’s integrated into where I’m already spending my time and is lightweight to contribute to.

Good points. I included the screenshot here to highlight a couple of things: the avatar is very small relative to text (compare and contrast with Twitter or even Disqus), and commenters don’t get their avatars displayed (another example of the power disparities I talked about above.

Quora has reviewers, who look over questions and answers. Charlie Cheever, talks about how they’re selected: “We tried to pick a set of people who had shown good judgement in the past and seemed to like the site a lot.” No mention of trying to get a diverse set of reviewers. And sure enough, the current reviewers over 70% male.

Charlie describes why this matters:

For example, this question was posted recently:

Who are the hottest girls on OKCupid?

I reviewed it with no changes since I didn’t see anything wrong with it. I don’t use OKCupid or any dating sites, but I tried to imagine doing so, and then seeing a question “Who are the hottest guys on OKCupid?” and thinking about how I would feel if I appeared on that list or didn’t appear on the list, and it didn’t seem offensive to me. However, someone messaged me recently saying “You personally reviewed Who are the hottest girls on OKCupid? and let it stand, which I think is a far worse question [than another question], as it both objectifies women and could invade privacy”, so there are different ways to see the question.

Yes there are. And if most of the reviewers are guys, then they’ll generally think questions like this are okay, and they’ll become the norm — and that’ll be hard to change over time.

March 6: One of the best-known moderators is Marc Bodnick, who also does weekly posts on “New users I’ve discovered”. Here’s the one for February 17. As I remark in a comment, it’s 90% male.

I think Quora might succeed over Yahoo in terms of more serious and professional Q+A and community site. I have a feeling it might build into a thought leadership space. I’ve actually just put an icon at the top of my site for people to connect with me on Quora as a result – it seems like it might develop into a great space to build your professional profile and prove your level of expertise in your subject matter. Only time will tell!

It’s a great observation about the opportunity … although for a lot of people LinkedIn’s Questions already fill that role. What (if anything) gives Quora an advantage?

And, now that I think of it, why doesn’t LinkedIn Questions come up more often in these discussions? We had great results with it a couple of times at Qworky. LinkedIn already has a big community there — industry diversity, and my impression its demographic diversity is pretty decent (a roughly 50/50 gender ratio). Quora’s got way better functionality, of course, but that’s far from the only consideration.

Much drama in the Quoraverse over a series of posts by Vivek, Senil, Robert, Dan, MG, Michael, and Robert. Hey wait a second, I’m noticing a pattern here …

Meanwhile, to celebrate being named “Startup of the Year” by TechCrunch at The Crunchies, Quora threw a party for its elite users, which apparently doesn’t include me. Oh well. From Ohad Samet’s trip report, it sounds like some great discussions but also a sausagefest.

[Switching briefly to art for a second: the climax of g0ddesses.net is a competition called “The Killing Fields” at the Ejaculation conference. The after-party is a sausagefest. Fortunately the afterparty to the afterparty has a very different gender ratio 🙂 But I digress.]

It’s a great example of how a lack of diversity early is very hard to overcome. If the crowd at Quora’s parties are overwhelmingly male, a lot of women and transfolk are going to be a lot less interested in attending. If the subjects are primarily tech-oriented, a lot people who aren’t techies will be very bored. And if it’s the same old same old crowd of Valley “elites”, then people who don’t revolve around that universe will react with a collective yawn. Of course guys who prefer hanging out with guys and elites who like talking to each other will looooove it, and that’s a lot of Quora’s current user base, so they’ll get really positive feedback. The net net is that they’re very likely to reinforce existing diversity problems in the community.

But if you’re getting the impression that Quora is, so far, for geeks, you’re right. I created an account—and began a descent into bafflement.

For example:

The account signup process says that Quora can use your Facebook or Twitter identity to save you time—so why did I have to enter my e-mail address and make up a password anyway?

So the site can send you email you don’t care about, of course! Next, David goes into some detail about how confusing the ‘follow’ concept his, and how the help information isn’t helpful. And when it’s time to actually ask the question …

I thought maybe I’d search the existing database of questions and answers. There’s a text box at the top of the screen, but the button at the right end doesn’t say Search—it says Add Question, which is not what I wanted.

Clicking the Ask Question button produces an error message that tells you to search for it first, and then if you don’t see the question you’re asking, click Ask Question a second time. But doing that only produced a series of instructional boxes that specified the proper format for questions.

And a lot more. Definitely worth reading for anybody thinking of starting up a Quora competitor. David’s conclusion:

But for now, the only question I have for Quora is, “Why not make this thing easier for normal people to figure out?”

most people aren’t comfortable with reaching out directly to experts and, sadly, it’s really difficult for scientists–let alone the lay public–to find solid scientific information on some topics. And when that scientific information is available, it can be really hard to understand.

But with Quora, anyone can connect with potential experts.

He’s got some smart points about scientists characteristics, including

Right! Actually nobody else likes to be wrong, especially in public, and a lot of Quora’s feedback mechanisms are very public. Just tonight a reviewer politely told me that my answer didn’t meet site guidelines and gave me a couple of ways to improve it. I thanked him and made the changes, so it’s certainly the right outcome. Still I would have been happier if we could have done it without a public discussion of how I had screwed up. But I digress.

Maybe give some sort of vetting system? Whatever happened to the endorsements? Maybe allow scientists to verify their expertise (although I’m sure that opens a whole bag of weird worms)? Or have a special “answers by experts” section? It’s no secret that Quora is very slanted toward the SV/start-up crowd. You’ve got a category for “Questions Where The CEO/Founder Answers Personally”. How about the same for peer-review published scientists?

And if you think about it, they also apply (with variations) to any other “community of practice” where expertise is valued. Worth paying attention to. I wonder how StackOverflow addresses this?

Here’s an example of what I think is rubbish, with a sample question: Who is the greatest living crossword puzzle constructor?

An answer might just say: Kevin Der

And to me, that’s rubbish (not that Kevin’s not a great crossword constructor, of course). The answerer took the time to type in Kevin’s name – even to tag him in the post with an @ – could you at least tell me why?

I agree that answers that provide the “Why” may be the best. However, I personally like succint answers that move the question page towards creating the perfect answer wiki.

I think for people that don’t know anything about the question, a short answer that lacks an explanation may be more helpful than no answer at all.

Here was my take:

+1 to Lisa. Sure I’d rather know why Kevin Der is the right answer but if 45 people vote up that one-word response and start talking about Kevin’s awesomeness in the comments that’s good enough for me. And similarly it’s great if somebody takes the time to summarize a link but hey, just the link is a lot better than nothing; if I’m really interested, I’ll go read it, summarize it myself, put it in a comment, and then the update.

When somebody takes the time to give helpful but albeit incomplete information, they’re doing a lot for the community. Here on Quora it seems like the response is to chastise them: YOU NEED TO DO MORE WORK. IF YOU DON’T DO IT THE WAY WE SAY YOU ARE A BAD MEMBER OF THE COMMUNITY. Why not thank people for their contributions and build on them?

March 7: Marius Kempe’s Does asking people to explain their answers to What’s the Best X? questions actually work? describes a well-crafted experiment with three different approaches to getting people to provide more information. None of them had even a 10% success rate, and two of the three provoked an “aggressive response” — i.e., they’re “enragers”, which lead to strong negative reactions. Making a suggestion in a comment got the best results: 3 successful edits (out of 60ish requests), no aggressive responses. Marius instead recommends collapsing them, even though this led to fewer edits and an aggressive response. Achilleas Vortselas commented:

I also don’t agree that collapsing is the way to go. First because you’re flipping the results on their own head. F.e, who’s to say that having 5% of bad answers improved isn’t better than having “clean” question pages? IMO it depends on the other answers. If there are good answers, together with bad, perhaps this makes sense. But there are questions (usually bad – read survey – questions) where there are only such answers. In that case collapsing them all is ridiculous and will most definitely reduce the chances of getting improved answers to nil.

That’s how it seemed to me as well. Which led to this discussion:

Interesting. With a limited number of moderators, it would seem a lot more efficient for “the crowd” to dismiss stuff like this if they don’t want to see it, and there are plenty of examples where it works just fine. For that matter the moderator could just downvote; that way, as soon as there are better answers these will sink to the bottom, and other users are also likely to get in the habit of downvoting. On top of that, the “collapsing” response sends a negative message that is likely to discourage (or enrage!) newcomers who are trying to help.

Hipster of course is best known for getting users on their mailing list without saying what they do. Actually I had a company like Hipster in an early draft of g0ddesses.net too. They were called Oooook and nobody knew what they did but wow, they sure pulled in the media attention. Part of Ooook’s shtick was that they would never take a meeting with anybody but they were fans of g0ddesses.net’s acting interim interim CEO’s blog so (gasp!) actually would meet in person. There were too many meetings in the book though so I cut it out. Maybe I should rethink things …

Business Insider also quotes a tech entpreneur they know as saying he wouldn’t want to be in Quora’s position:

“They’re getting all this awesome hype, and people are coming to the site, and they’re just not ready to live up to it. People ask questions and almost everyone who goes to Quora and asks a question does not get it answered.”

“Millions of people whose initial impressions of Quora are going to be bad. It’s unfortunate because the idea is good; they’re just not there yet.”

The onslaught of new users has stirred resentment among some of Quora’s early adopters and has fueled debate surrounding community identity, standards and guidelines. Some new users are being bullied or intimidated into silence, or simply shown the door. Those who are encouraged to stay are also encouraged to keep their activity to a minimum.

Signal-to-noise ratio and scaling discussions abound on Quora. Early-adopters have huddled together, sidestepping and lamenting newcomers who might pose a threat to the elite core….

It’s true Quora is one of the few places people can read thoughtful answers composed by the CEO of Twitter himself, but many more answers are composed by Quora insiders on a soap-box or narcissists too deep in their own disorder to even know or care that they are invisible to the elites….

I encouraged my students to try Quora with an open-mind. But the majority reported feeling too self-conscious or intimidated to participate fully.

Kelly Craig kicked off the comments with

I am a college student, and serious about my studies and future career. I am also new to Quora but I am left rethinking every question, every answer, every word because of the pressure of criticism. I feel as though even if a piece is insightful, grammatically correct, and well explained, it will not be accepted. Does Quora want student participation or is the new generation uninvited?

After which it got ugly, as the insiders attacked Christie. It’s almost like they didn’t want to listen.

More on the “Quora elite” here and here. The “People Rank” algorithm is likely to increase the power of the long-term users with lots of followers and upvotes and marginalize “newbies”. To me it seems like the most important members of their community are sabotaging their business by driving off newcomers. I wonder how Quora’s execs and investors see it?

Certain recent events involving newbies, famous people and purported “inner circles” and “Quora elite” that are supposed to exist have left me very ambivalent, not about Quora, but about people’s expectations online.

People seem to come online with the expectation, “somebody make me feel welcome/at home here….”

The right expectations to have? “I will either build, belong, or bugger off.”

The “recent events” he’s talking here about are the aftermath of Christie’s post I summarized in the previous comment.

A couple of people suggested Christie’s post would be good for Quora Review blog, so some of the discussion moved to the Quora Review Facebook group and QR editor Yishan Wong and a few other members Quoraelite engaged in classic bullying behavior. The worst stuff was behind closed doors but a handful of follow-ups on Quora and the Quora Review give a taste of it (1, 2, 3). Christie left the group at which point the snide and condescending remarks escalated … eventually I got kicked out, although before then others had started to speak up as well.

It’s a lot like high school.

And it’s also a real tough situation for Quora. Some of their most active and well-respected users are attacking potential new community members and telling them to bugger off — a sharp contrast to the site’s stated ethos of “be nice”. If bullies like Yishan don’t change their behavior, they’re one more barrier to Quora’s getting to the more diverse audiences they need.

Venkat goes on

I have absolutely NO sympathy for people who don’t make an effort to create alternative cultures that they are comfortable with, but keep whining that the incumbent culture should change.

The online world is not fundamentally limited the way real estate on Planet Earth is. You don’t HAVE to go around changing incumbent cultures. You can simply set up a competing culture, offering more diversity and choice for all.

Hmm. Plenty of people (including, I believe, Quora’s investors and executives) don’t share Venkat’s cultural vision of it as “Darwinian” and “a far more of a loosely-governed outlaw Wild West, without much ‘rule of law,’ than the relatively polite, helpful and friendly exterior might suggest” or his philosophies the value of being annoying. It’s not whining when people challenge him and highlight the impact it has on the site. Of course it would be easier for him if others buggered off but he shouldn’t hold his breath.

That said, I totally agree with the last sentence. Indeed, I’d take it a step further. A competing culture that makes newcomers feel welcome and at home is likely to have a significant advantage over Quora — and offer a lot more diversity and choice.

Alas, Quora doesn’t release demographic information, so it’s hard to know how representative these points are. Everything I see, though, makes it seem like that they’ve got a huge dilemma going forward. If long-time members of the community tend to be ranked higher by the PeopleRank algorithm, it will come out incredibly male-dominated. But if they adjust the ranking algorithm to make up for this, the people who have invested the most effort into the site in the earlier days are likely to feel that they’re being unfairly penalized. And who can blame them?

I was talking with a friend earlier today about Quora’s vulnerability to a competitor like the hypothetical women-led, diversity-oriented g0ddesses.net. Sure, there are plenty of people who don’t care, or even prefer a male-dominated environment. But a heck of a lot of women I know are tired of systems that are rigged against them — and so are likely to be interested in an alternatives. And I’m certainly not the only guy who’s tired of overwhelmingly-male environments.

Now imagine if this diversity-focused competitor starts to gain momentum and begins marketing to Quora’s current users. “Hey, check out this alternative to Quora, it may not have all the functionality yet but here are a few pages with really good information and discussions — and women aren’t second-class citizens there.” That’ll probably get at least some interest. And if it happens, it won’t be easy or cheap for Quora to pivot and fend off the threat. The heavily-skewed existing ratio will be hard to recover from, and on top of that there’s self-reinforcing norms as described in “Confessions of a Quora Newbie” and “Build, Belong or Bugger Off” and the biases baked into the all the data they’ve collected so far. . At the risk of quoting myself, diversity is like security: you really do need to think about it up front.

Attitudes on Hacker News are general fairly cynical about Quora (seeing it as overhyped and not as good as Stack Overflow). Even so, a lot more Quora questions are starting to show up on HN — enough that it’s starting to cause some grumbling. For example:

It really is a great discussion on Quora, with perspectives from the founders of Dropbox, Pandora, VoiceTap, Buddy Beers, and many other startups — and some nicely-presented data by Josh Hannah So I feel somewhat churlish for bringing it up, but still …

With the exception of Karen Moon, who just posted this morning, the other 27 responses are all from guys.

Senil Shah’s The World of Quora Users [infographic] talks about the different roles: askers, answerers, private messagers, commenters, curators, editors, flaggers, reviewers, admins, and lurkers. Expanding it further, there are also visitors (who arrive at a particular question and answer via search or a link from a blog), browsers (who come back and cruise around the site), Quora employees — and no doubt other interesting categories. Which leads to an interesting question …

What are the incentives for each of these different groups?

For example, PeopleRank is set up to reward answerers. Answerers also get a lot of emotional incentives (upvotes and thanks) as well as potential disincentives (being downvoted, marked “not helpful”, or collapsed). Answers get a lot of visibility, and curators and questioners do too. But there really isn’t a lot there for editors.

It wasn’t just Quora who was down. Amazon’s problems affected like Reddit, Foursquare, Hootsuite, and many others. In IT World, Ahmar Abbas comments

while a huge number of companies have adopted the public cloud paradigm, their thought process behind design and deployment of their applications on public clouds still seems to follow the traditional datacenter deployment model… Organizations that leverage native AWS capabilities, such as creating Amazon Machine Images (AMI) for all applications, utilizing snapshots and leveraging one or more of the other 4 geographically isolated AWS regions, can successfully weather these outages.

Netflix, a large AWS user has institutionalized this in their deployment model. In fact they frequently let loose their Chaos Monkey that constantly forces random failures of even stable AWS instances to ensure recovery. Unlike Foursquare, Quora and Hootsuite, Netflix did not report any failures during the current AWS east region outage.

Well done by Netflix! Their CEO Reed Hastings was previously founder/CEO of the great software engineering company Purify, which was a semi-competitor for my 1990s startup Intrinsa. A mutual friend invited me to one of Netflix’ IPO roadshow meetings, and I asked Reed whether he saw software quality as one of their competitive advantages. Seems like the answer is yes 🙂

More generally, it’s a good wakeup call — not just for Quora but for anybody thinking about cloud-based system architectures. Ever since Amazon booted Wikileaks in response to US government pressure I’ve been arguing that anybody hosting user-generated content needed to make sure they had contingency plans rather than relying solely on Amazon. This is one more reason.

This edition of Marc Bodnick’s new users to watch is a great illustration of the challenges overcoming initial biases in the community. These days many of the recommendations on the list come from other people besides Marc. Quora product manager Sandra Liu Huang and designer Rebekah Cox suggested five women and one guy. By contrast the guys that Marc talked to didn’t recommend any women at all. So despite an obvious effort, the list as a whole remains over 70% male.

When PeopleRank was first introduced, it was a hasty solution to an emerging problem that has since receded in importance. It was used to weed out comments to be unfeatured and answers to be placed below the “pending review” line. It was an attempt to hide the bad content under the carpet, because the reviewers were overwhelmed by the traffic and couldn’t keep up.

The problem with it is that it stuck to the site and since it is not transparent and its effect on any specific page can always be discounted as a result of downvotes, it is below most people’s radar. This was quite frustrating to me when PeopleRank was launched, for the reasons that Robert mentions.

But I’ve grown accustomed to it and now I only rarely get reminded that it exists and that it’s always inherently wrong. Anything that violates the democratic principle is wrong, regardless of whether we find it useful or not.

Update, June 6: This week’s New Users to Follow list for the week starts off with a dozen guys and winds up about 2/3 male. Once again Quora employees Sandra and Rebekah recommended women; this time, so did Charlie Cheever and Andy Barton. Overall, though, guys recommended 13 guys and only 3 women. As existing biases get more and more entrenched, they get harder and harder to change …

Thanks for the comment, Shannon. Agreed about thinking about gender diversity broadly including all the aspects of QUILTBAG. And of course within each one there’s a lot of variation; so for T, as well as more transsexuals, Quora may well need more transgendered people and transvestites. No idea to whether lesbians and transsexuals are underrepresented relative to women as a whole; another great example of information that would be interesting to know. Unfortunately, unlike male/female gender ratios there aren’t any good approaches I know of for getting even rough estimates of any of these numbers … suggestions welcome!

> Lack of women on Quora is a symptom of an issue, not the issue itself, and the Quora product cannot affect broad societal change to address that issue.

I strongly disagree. Other social networks have much better gender diversity. And nothing I discussed in How would Quora be different if it prioritized diversity? required societal change.

> Don’t feel like a feminist for hand-wringing about not seeing enough women in your club. Do something with real impact.

Agreed about the importance of measurable impact — and if you look my answer to the question I linked to there are quite a few recommendations that have real impact. Several of my recent gender diversity efforts have doubled participation by women in heavily male tech-oriented environments so it certainly is possible.

But Quora isn’t “my club”. It’s Quora’s leadership, investors, and key community members who set the priorities and decide whether or this is something they care about. So I don’t see this post as hand-wringing but instead as part of a diversity-in-technology case study whose outcome is still unknown.

Google Trends’ report on Quora traffic unsurprisngly shows that it peaked in January and then went down after the site temporarily introduced barriers to new participants. Traffic dropped again in March (StackOverflow had a similar drop around the same time, so it may well be due to changes in Google’s search algorithm or traffic measurement) …

And hasn’t increased since. Hmm …

Gary Rivlin’s Wired story Does Quora have all the answers? gives some context for the drop-off after the January spike — and once again raises the question of getting beyond the Silicon Valley focus:

Both founders acknowledge that the average quality of answers on Quora has ticked down significantly. The site was flooded with so many new members at the start of the year—a fivefold spike in just a month—that at one point in mid-January, half of Quora’s users had been on the site for two weeks or less.

Cheever also understands that he needs to ease Quora’s focus away from Silicon Valley and toward the wider world. He gives examples of some of the new topics burbling up on the site: Farming. Curling. Romania…. But he also doesn’t argue too hard with the observation, clear to anyone who spends much time on the site, that the tech scene still vastly overwhelms other areas of discussion. “It’s changing slowly,” he says. A PR person follows up with a sampling of Quora newcomers, who include a veterinarian, an economist, and a screenwriter. But the list is dominated by tech people and students, which pretty much sums up Quora as it has developed so far.

Indeed. A followon thread on Quora discusses Rivlin’s comment “Stray from the startup scene, though, and Quora can look disappointingly like a ghost town.”

At roughly the same time, I also asked Stack Exchange (more precisely, on answers.onstartups.com, powered by Stack Exchange and hosted by On Startups) and very quickly I got three good responses. I also asked on Hacker News, and got some good responses there. (You can see the summary and links in Communications tools for Startup Weekend: Some recommendations.)

Of course, it’s just one data point. But it sure is an interesting one …

Hmm. I wonder why nobody’s suggested that TechStars Seattle mentors Greg Gottesmann and Chris DeVore disclose their relevant affiliations? That said, they’re good people to answer the question; and other voices are being heard as well — a great example of the importance of anonymous speech. And kudos to Quora for supporting anonymous voting!

What’s interesting too, is how quickly the discussion [on Google+] took off, while another thread lingered over on Q&A site Quora. “20+ answers here in a few minutes,” said Le Meur, “only one in Quora.”

This, of course, begs the question: what will become of Quora once Google rolls out Google Questions into Google Plus? While Quora is positioned a bit differently – only “quality” answers are rewarded on its site, there’s something to be said for the reduced barrier to entry, speed and ease with which you can comment and contribute on Google Plus. And in the end, that may prove just as, if not more, valuable, simply because it gets more people to participate. And because individual answers can be “+1’ed,” there are possibilities for rewarding quality answers already built in to this new system.

PS: Sarah’s Why Quora Thinks I’m a Scraper, from about six weeks ago, is a great description of her being blocked by Quora for reading too many posts via RSS — and their less-than-helpful response.

So, I hadn’t heard about Quora before a conversation on G+. I decided to investigate just because it was mentioned as another social service. While I’ll confess that a Q&A service centered around real names is probably not ideal for me. I did sign up using a mononym. Nym NLN.

The next day I get a message in my inbox explaining the rules of Quora to me. Quoted below in it’s entirety. The part worth noting. Is the admin’s name really ‘Quora Admin’. Do note that the policy that is linked does nothing to define real name, but says that if a moderator suspects you are not using a real name, they will ask for proof of your identity which consists of paperwork that may not reflect your real name.

Quora Admin
Hello,

One of the rules of Quora is that everyone uses his or her real full name. Do you mind changing your name to reflect that?

If this is a mistake and you are already using your real name, just reply to this message letting us know that.

You can change your name here:
Edit Profile Name

And you can find more details here:
Do I have to use my real name on Quora? Can businesses or organizations have a user account?

If you would like to ask, answer, and follow questions anonymously, Quora supports this and can also prevent your name from appearing in search engine results. See the Anonymity on Quora FAQ for more information.

Annnnnd a final update. Evidently the perception that they aren’t following their own rules is cleared up by the fact that as far as participating *on* the site goes, Quora Admin is a limited account, like any other user with a nym.

My answer quoting one of the nymwars’ main protagonists (Skud) on the difference between Google+ and Quora, complete with a comment from her, is languishing near the bottom. It’s got five up-votes, but apparently some downvotes as well, because it’s trailing answers with a single up-vote.

There are several other good answers — I Pete Griffith, Jay Wacker, and Phil Jones — but Yishan’s off-topic rant has almost 20 times as many votes as the runner up.

I cannot speak for any but myself, obviously, but for me, Quora is not a place where I would consider the need for a pseudonym; the place is built around the idea of developing personal/professional credibility for quality of answers and this context is generally aligned with an academic/business/career perspective that lends better to real name use than otherwise.

Given that Quora is a closed community, the consistency between stated purpose and function(ality) of the site is, to my mind, also in alignment.

This said, I can understand why some would want to use a pseudonym, but I also understand why (given the above), it is not a choice presented by the Quora team.

As for reasons why your answer isn’t getting voted up; most engaging the topic at the moment are doing so well outside a specific application or context; naturally, this means that answers that focus on a particular context (especially those that do so to the exclusion of the broader discussion) are not likely to be considered as valuable.

I am fascinated that you consider Yishan’s answer off-topic or rantish; while I do not agree with all his points, he is, I think, spot on about the reasons why real names and pseudonymous names continue to clash online. To wit, that authentication and deniability are (and should be!!) managed independently of one another and it is the attempt to lump them together (for various reasons) that creates this problem.

Succinctly, Google wouldn’t be in this position had they allowed the user to retain choice about when they are authenticated (i.e., verified, publicly known, etc) and when they are permitted to act with deniability.

In fact, had they unveiled functionality that (a) kept my real name veiled until I chose otherwise, (b) allowed one or more pseudonyms that could be manged where/as I choose, and (c) committed to never selling any of my information or my habits except in aggregate format, I likely would not have issue with them (or have left them) at all.

Thanks for the reply, Bonnie. Good point that the people using Quora for professional and academic credibility purposes are likely to find it more useful to do so under the name they use for their career; and Quora’s got an explicit exceptions to their policy for people who are sufficiently famous under an alternate name. I upvoted your answer 🙂

As for Yishan’s answer, putting aside for a moment the question of whether he’s right or wrong, I really don’t see how it responds to the question. Those of us who think that names are more fundamentally about identity (as opposed to authentication and deniability) think that with respect to Quora as well as Google. So he’s not explaining the different reactions in the two cases. Instead he’s going on a great length, agressively bolding, attacking danah boyd, and ignoring everything that’s been written about the nymwars.

Regarding why I’m not getting more upvotes, I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying about context. Do you mean that most of the voters don’t know Skud’s and the Rainydays’ role in the nymwars, and so don’t see my explanation as providing the value of some of the other answers? If so that seems plausible. But I don’t think that can account for the downvotes I’ve gotten.

In any case, the net result is that Quora as a whole thinks that the opinions of people actually involved in the topic the question’s about aren’t particularly valuable, which was the point I was trying to make. It’ll be interesting to see whether your answer fares better.

Jon, I think we may be talking past one another in relation to Yishan’s commentary; I have no interest in the person’s agenda (or lack), but it does seem that identify is not mutually exclusive to the matters of authentication and deniability (to me, anyway)… in other words, I find the three concepts work far better together than in conflict with one another and feel no need to context Yishan’s opinion about nyms as it doesn’t actually affect that the three work together (why waste energy, eh?).

Names, obviously, ARE about identity; just as any word is an identifier. It would be obtuse to an extreme to pretend otherwise. This said, it is equally true that the crux of the matter is that the reasons why names become an issue is due to incomplete, vague, or otherwise inconsistent considerations in relation to authentication and deniability.

If one asserts that:

An individual has the right to choose how they are identified (outside of legally in such venues as legal identity is required).

Then one must also accept that the concept of deniability is inalienable in all contexts outside the legal as well.

Additionally, one must accept that authentication has the capacity to destroy deniability, thus, issues of authentication must give way to deniability in all venues that are not legal in nature.

If this becomes the foundational relationship, resolving all matters is greatly simplified AND the primary assertion (as above outlined) remains unassailed.

THIS is why I find no need to care about Yishan’s words except those that clearly set forth the relevant concepts. That Yishan did not correctly interpret them, did not seem to fully understand the implications and this relationship between identity, authentication, and deniability does not in any manner detract from it (except to those who are distracted by it)…. I remain on point. 🙂

On the upvote matter, yes, the people are not known thus, not known to be credible, thus the answer may not be found legitimate (understandable in so far as we’re speaking of a closed community in which previously mentioned academic/business/career context is primary). As to downvotes, I suspect those who are aware of this and hold an opposing opinion are merely exercising their ability to detract from/work to remove it from view.

I do not think it as much a matter that “opinions of people involved do not count” as much as it is a stereotype (not uncommon) of involved persons being somewhat strongly polarized and much less likely to discuss/logically argue the core points (i.e., heavy preferential bias impeding discourse). Also, that the traditional academic/business perspective that “it’s not accurate until/unless a vetted authority says it is” is in effect.

Frankly, this should not be surprising and I would suggest that a deliberately impersonal discourse would be of far greater assistance in a venue like Quora in particular, but probably elsewhere, too. Vinegar versus honey… even as I freely admit it is hard to pour forth honey when it’s vinegar roiling about in the mind. (grin)

Bonnie, apologies for the belated response. I agree we’re talking past each other about Yishan’s answer. The point I was trying to make is that it doesn’t respond to the question. Yes, I agree that identity interacts with authentication and deniability; the question is about why there hasn’t been an outcry about Quora’s real names policy but there is about Google.

On the upvotes, my guess is that most of the people saw Yishan’s answer in their feed and voted it up without looking at other answers. Jay Wacker’s is excellent, very clearly written, right below Yishan’s, and he’s a Stanford professor … and it only has 10 votes! As Stormy Shippy reported in A Connected Quora: Voting Patterns, everybody loves Yisah’s content; he’s part of the core group that routinely votes each other up, so his answers get plenty of visibility.

For the downvotes, it might well be people who disagree with me — many people ignore the policy that disagreement shouldn’t lead to a downvote. If it’s a matter of my perceived authority in this area, that’s pretty funny … not to toot my own horn or anything, but I have waaaaaay better credentials in this area than Yishan or most of the other people in the thread. Then again who knows. It could be that some people just voted me down because they don’t like me. I asked why in a comment but unsurprisingly nobody responded.

Why do you think that a deliberately impersonal discourse would work better on Quora? Yishan’s discourse is extremely personal, and he thrives there; ditto Mark Bodnick and many others. And an impersonal style doesn’t work well for me much of anywhere. So, I certainly agree that I could use more honey on Quora … but I think I’ll keep the personal touch 🙂

Well, it would be foolish to deny that there is a dynamic of cronyism in all human groups. That said, there is also something of a taboo in regard to asking after one’s rank (not just at Quora) and this may play into a bit.

There hasn’t been an outcry at Quora because, frankly, most of the people there are on decidedly “main street” and, I think, are far more likely to support real name use than not… The ramifications and future challenge to things like privacy and choice don’t really inhabit their regular thoughts.

Back in late July, Quora introduced “Credits”, an incentive system to get people to answer questions. Alexia Tsotsis has more on TechCrunch. Since I didn’t answer the fist question, looks like my price went up 🙂

Quora is dying. It has a core group of about 50 heavy users who spend their days generating 90% of the content half of which consists of back-slapping each other for being so smart. Even worse you have mods and reviewers censoring material they don’t agree with. It’s degenerated into one circle-jerk.

Everyone on Quora should be nice, but violation of the “Be Nice” rule should never be cited as the reason behind an enforcement action….

The problem with such rules is that if a rule says “Do X,” the actual enforcement of that rule necessarily ends up invoking the statement “Person X was not doing X.”

Well yeah. A rule like “be nice” necessarily involves calling bullies, trolls, and others on it when they’re not being nice. Bob Sutton’s “No Assholes Rule” is a good example of this, with a lot of evidence for why it’s a good idea. I guess I don’t fully understand Yishan’s argument.

Of course there are a lot more guys than women voting, so the overall vote is quite close — 54/47 in favor of being nice. And a lot of members of the “Quora elite” are siding with Yishan. For example here’s Venkatesh Rao in an excerpt from his comment on Mark’s post:

Curious. I tend to disagree with Yishan most of the time, but this is one of the minority cases where I happen to agree with him.

“Be Nice,” if meant sincerely, is paternalistic, infantilizing and borderline offensive. Like something out of “Everything I needed to know, I learned in kindergarten.”

Enjoyable interactions are usually in a yin-yang relationship with truth-discovering interactions. They involve pandering, flattery, groupthink, assumed consensus, anchoring and so forth. This is a dynamic that goes far beyond mere political correctness.

Perhaps you might want to apply the classroom-without-a-teacher metaphor instead of a host/guest metaphor to see what I am getting at. Not quite a Lord of the Flies level state of war, but significantly more Hobbesian than “Be Nice” might suggest.

I wonder how Quora’s founders feel about “not quite the Lord of the Flies”?

Back in March, after some particularly egregious bullying by Yishan and friends, I said

And it’s also a real tough situation for Quora. Some of their most active and well-respected users are attacking potential new community members and telling them to bugger off — a sharp contrast to the site’s stated ethos of “be nice”. If the Venkateshes and Yishans don’t change their behavior, they’re one more barrier to Quora’s getting to the more diverse audiences they need.

Quora’s spent the last several months focused on improving engagement by, guess what, gamifying. Quora Credits and the accompanying changes limited how much people can interact with each other, introduced a rich-get-richer currency called Quora Credits, and introducing a tax. Yishan Wong quickly emerged as the richest man on Quora with 94,000 credits — and started running an investment scheme.

My first reaction to Pinterest was “It’s pretty!” and so far everybody else I’ve showed it too had a similar response. As well as the visuals, Pinterest’s demographics — more women than men — are a huge contrast with Quora. And the results have been impressive so far, to say the least. In late December, Quora responded.

Q&A site Quora launched a new feature on Monday that has nothing to do with Q’s or A’s. “Boards” function like Pinterest’s “pinboards,” allowing users to collect and organize web content under topics they create.

Writes Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo in a blog post, “As Quora has grown, we’ve learned that people want to read the most interesting content regardless of whether it happens to be in question and answer format or not.” D’Angelo tells me that this shift fits in better with Quora’s new goal, “to connect you with everything you want to know about.” Its old goal was described as “a continuously improving collection of questions and answers.”

When question and answer community Quora launched to the general public last year, social media geeks were calling it the ‘next big thing’ and now just over a year later a select few are admittedly still dedicated fans, but most of us have forgotten all about it.

Now in an attempt to make it relevant to a wider audience, Quora is becoming much more like a curation tool than a simple question and answer website. Yesterday Quora Boards was launched, which gives users the means to curate posts from Quora and content from round the web and then save it to a board. Sound familiar? Well yep, that’s because one of our favourite sites, Pinterest, uses boards as a way for users to bookmark things too, but from what we can tell Pinterest is much more visual and Quora Boards will allow users to curate all kinds of content.

– The blatant one-upmanship of the site turns them off
– There’s nothing they can contribute (seriously, many women feel that way)
– They don’t want the grief of getting downvoted (because they are a woman)
– Like me, just didn’t consider contributing
– They use neuter or male profiles
– One or two women were early users and got turned off by the online behavior of the sexism and discrimination they endure in real life.

Growth is the ticket to Pinterest’s funding, since it hasn’t had the
opportunity to have slowing revenue growth or disappoint investors with
monetization troubles yet, because it has yet to even try to make any
money. In fact, the company started its first test of advertising, called “promoted pins” that appear in search results and category feeds, just a few weeks ago.

But that’s an unpaid trial, according to the extensive disclosure post
personally penned by Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann that tried to ease
users into the idea of advertisers having any place at all on the site.

Still, as with Facebook’s Instagram, advertisers are interested in
finding new ways of reaching consumers in innovative ways. Pinterest,
essentially, is building the ultimate personalized catalog of the
digital age.

Next year, Quora hopes to start a money-making business; Marc Bodnick, the company’s head of business and community, said Quora was likely to put ads with its answers. “The real value is in the 90 percent of questions that aren’t about what will happen next week,” he said. “Our traffic is evergreen.”

The article also estimats current usage at 1.5 million unique in December, about half of Stack Overflow.

To boost confidence in answers, host exclusive content, and bring in new audiences, Quora today launched Verified Profiles. First up is President Obama who will answer two affordable care act questions today. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and actor/investor Ashton Kutcher will also display blue check marks when asking or answering questions in Quora’s 500,000 topics.

Since its launch in early 2010, Quora’s question and answer site has built a catalog of intelligent, subjective views on the universe. But despite raising around $71 million, Quora is thought to have not yet to achieved breakout traffic and consistent mainstream usage. Some (not always accurate) third-party measurement services peg it at around 1 million monthly unique users.

Getting Obama is certainly a coup; and if Cory Booker starts posting again (his last posts were a couple of years ago) that could be interesting as well. Hard to how much having Mark Cuban, Craig Newmark, Ashton Kutcher et al. “verified” will help; they all have accounts there and occasionally participate. And more generally, there are 19 profiles in the list on TechCrunch — 17 guys (plus Sheryl Sandberg and actress/writer Michelle Rodriguez). So I’m kind of skeptical this will help with diversity …

Some of the themes that come up a lot are being exposed to questions that are sexist or woman-hating. Anita Santz phrases it like this “Questions about women that are disrespectful need to be flagged and reworded from the get-go. Otherwise, just seeing questions like this, much less being A2A’d [asked to answer] on them is like walking into a party and getting a signal that it’s just not a safe place to be.”

A lot of people discuss problems with anonymous questions, answers, and comments. Quora requires your real name for your account but lets people with accounts participate “anonymously” — although Quora employees can see who’s made each anonymous post, and it’s discoverable by law enforcement and criminal cases. So it’s basically the worst case for anonymity, all the potential for abuse, no privacy benefit, no real protection for dissenting speech. But, there are some good suggestions about tools to improve the situation: the ability to disallow anonymous A2A’s for example, or filter out anonymous questions or comments.

One specific piece of functionalty that comes up several times is the ability to delete messages in your inbox. I know, I know, The Tapestries doesn’t have it yet either; but Quora’s been running for four years and has raised $71 million so it’s a little less excusable in their case!

Erica Friedman says “Most importantly, I’d really like to be able to protect other women from dealing with crap”. She suggests a “troll” button, wonders whether it would be possible to ban (or limit visibility of) questions like “what the fuck is wrong with women”.

“But Quora hasn’t proven it can scale beyond the Silicon Valley echo chamber. The site’s questions are still more weighted toward topics of interest to its early Silicon Valley adopters, like entrepreneurship, venture capital and technology.”

Oliver Emberton did several interesting posts analyzing number of followers. He didn’t explicitly look at diversity but it’s hard to miss. For example in Celebs are losing, Top Writers are winning, Gayle Laakmann McDowell (#25) is the only woman in the top 40; and Balaji Viswanathan, Yishan Wong, and Jeremiah Owyang may well be the only non-whites. Things are only a little better for the top writers, but not that much …

Speaking of Gayle, here’s a great question she asked:

Most people don’t seem to think it’s a problem. Funny how that works. My answer is languishing near the bottom. Big surprise.

On TechCrunch,Adam tells Josh Constine that YC invested an amount similar to their standard $120K (which would be about 0.013% ownership). Josh also has some interesting thoughts about the potential value to Quora and to YC.

The most important thing missing from everything about modern privacy discussions is the fact that there is a critical difference in the way men and women (as well as other targeted populations) perceive privacy — because men don't bear target status….

This means that social media sites, apps, and all their privacy settings have a baseline of "normal" that doesn't take into consideration that half of the users are dealing with being targeted, and all the ugly experiences that can come with it.

Indeed. And she has some specific suggestions for what Quora could do differently:

For instance, sites shouldn't let strangers message strangers, and all sites and apps should allow users to block others. When Quora tells people to pick interests or topics they want, it should also tell them to pick interests or topics they don't want.

Sites like Quora need robust blocking and reporting mechanisms: A block should be across all site functions, it should provide report fields for details, screencaps and links, and it should count into an internal karma system, with an internal cross-matching to flag potential sock puppets.

Quora could also avoid additional drama if it gave users clear tutorials about friending and unfriending, so targets know how to mute, block and remove connections.

Sites that want a lasting community need to stop being afraid of having a zero tolerance policy on misogyny, racism, homophobia, personal attacks, threats and harassment. That policy should include attacks on people outside the site, which can encourage the same toxicity as an attack on another user.

Ellen Pao will step in as interim CEO at Reddit, and founder Alexis Ohanian (who's been very active on the civil liberties front) is returning as Executive Chairman. What does that have to do this thread? It’s because the CEO who resigned was Yishan Wong, who was one of the biggest bullies on Quora.

Y Combinator's Sam Altman:

The reason was a disagreement with the board about a new office (location and amount of money to spend on a lease). To be clear, though, we didn’t ask or suggest that he resign—he decided to when we didn’t approve the new office plan.

I realize that this sounds non-credible (and it's certainly one of the craziest professional things I've ever been a part of), but it's actually what happened.

Yishan wanted to move the office from SF to Daly City. The board pushed back but said we'd agree to it with certain data (we wanted Yishan to figure out how many employees would stay with the company through the move, get a comparison to other market rents, etc.–all questions I think a board should ask when thinking through a major commitment).

This is certainly not what I was expecting to be dealing with so quickly after investing in reddit, but we'll make the best of it.

But things have been tumultuous at Reddit in recent months. After the company raised a major investment round, Reddit management requested that the company’s global employees relocate to San Francisco or leave the company, according to tweets sent by Mr. Wong.

Mr. Wong also recently had a public argument with a former employee of the site in which he laid out the terms of his former employee’s termination in excruciating detail. That incident, according to people close to the company, made some of Reddit’s current employees uncomfortable.

Meanwhile, the guy saying “I think that the type of people who accumulate capital and invest it wisely are not the type of people who would do rash things” (hahahaha) has been a “Top Writer” on Quora for the last six years.

It’s almost like the situation was common knowledge six years before so many people were shocked, shocked, by last summer’s VC harassment scandals – but the Silicon Valley (white, male) “elites” posting and voting on Quora were in denial.